Darragh Aldrich

From Girl Going Nowhere (1939) by Darragh Aldrich

She clambered up a bank strewn with debris and wove her way in and out among old buildings to the bridge whose lights at night looked like bright pennies tossed against the blackness. She liked the lower bridge better for that showed the shining tapers at night burning upside down in the dark waters of the Mississippi. Across the bridge and past the Salvation Army Industrial Home on Nicollet Island where Blackie had worked an hour for some cracked plates and cups and some more spoons. Their household equipment he had called it. She grinned as she passed the alluring big windows with their display of second-hand furniture and odds and ends of dishes. More equipment. Funny about that word.

Writer and radio commentator Clara Chapline Thomas Aldrich (pen name Darragh Aldrich) wrote her first complete story at age eight. She earned her B.A. from the University of Minnesota in 1900. She was an editor of the University of Minnesota paper, The Gopher, and an occasional contributor to The Minnesota Daily. After graduation, she taught the classics at St. Mary's Hall in Faribault, Minnesota for three years. Aldrich was a special reporter and columnist for the Minneapolis Tribune from 1906-15. Her regular column Quentins Corner was thought to be written by a man and Quentin was admitted into the National Humorists society. When they discovered Quentin was a woman, Aldrich was forced to resign from the society. Aldrich was a radio commentator and head of Women's Activities for WCCO radio in Minneapolis from 1941-56. In addition, she wrote novels, short stories, and plays. Her novel, Enchanted Hearts(1917), was adapted for the Broadway stage under the title A Prince There Was (1918), and the play was later made into a movie also entitled A Prince There Was (1921).

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